


purgatorio

by wtfmulder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, s11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 15:32:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13437801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wtfmulder/pseuds/wtfmulder
Summary: Why are Mulder and Scully seemingly married in “This” but seemingly still broken up in “Plus One”?





	purgatorio

Her apartment is out of the way, and normally he wakes up ten minutes early to make sure he has time to swing on by and pick her up. The damn alarm on his cell phone never goes off at the time he sets it, though, and his internal clock is a piece of garbage now. Every nine minutes are nine minutes missing. **  
**

Ain’t no thang. He speeds up his morning routine, skips breakfast, and when he forgets to put his watch on he doesn’t bother going back for it. He’s on route with a minute to spare, flipping through the radio stations with a growing sense of despair. The president is going to kill us all, and no one plays a fucking guitar anymore.

Dirt roads turn into busy streets, then he’s pulling into a quaint complex of one bedroom apartments just a few minutes detour from the beltway, the last bit of quiet before you reach D.C. Completely and utterly Scully from the moment you pass the bushels of abelia marking the front entrance, but you wouldn’t gather that from how much she complains. He drives up to the gate, flashes his I.D. to the security guard, and finds the building all the way at the back. She looks up from her phone, neatly wrapped in her light gray blazer pantsuit, and smiles at him, stepping down from the curb and bending low to hunker into the car.

“Morning, Mulder,” she says, belting herself in. He replies in kind, navigating roundabout after roundabout. She puts her thermos in the cupholder and freezes when she finds his empty. 

“Did you eat breakfast?” She asks, frowning. She flips the visor down, runs the tip of her finger underneath her lips and hmms at something she sees. Then she groans to her reflection when he answers in the negative, slamming the mirror back up to glare at him. “Mulder, come on!”

He laughs. “What? There’s a Starbucks right across the street. I’ll buy you a cake pop.” He hears a rustling, her going through her bag. “And I thought I was the Boy Scout,” he says.

“Indian Guide,” she corrects. She unwraps a KIND bar and points it by his mouth, and he nibbles on it while she flips through the radio. “Ugh,” she groans, shutting it off.

He swallows white chocolate and almond, nodding at the dash. “Any updates on that podcast already? The one about _the lost objects of historical significance in war torn countries_ ,” he recalls, dropping his voice low in an imitation of the host. “That reminds me, I need to bury my baseball cards before we’re nuked.”

“We finished it. I don’t remember anything because of all the wine, but I know we finished it.” She keeps one arm outstretched while he chews, and uses the other to connect her phone to the Bluetooth and scroll through her playlist. “But I downloaded this the other day and never got to start it. I heard it’s pretty good. _The History of Rome_.” 

“School’s in session,” he says happily, and and she crumples up the wrapper and starts the first episode. 

***

The alarm on Scully’s phone is pretty trustworthy, as far as phones go. When hers goes off he takes his pill, about fifteen minutes after they eat lunch. And then about two hours before they’re set to head out for the day, the alarm goes off again, and they take a brisk walk around the Hoover building to get their final steps in. 

“I’m gonna kick your butt today,” she taunts, adjusting the band of her FitBit. They push open the glass doors and pick up their pace, and he pushes out his lips at her determined smirk. “What? You had me do _three_ autopsies today, Mulder. I reached my goal four hours ago.”

He narrows his eyes at her, and she at him. Then he lengthens out his legs and falls into a jog, tugging his work shirt away from his nipples. “Mulder, that’s cheating!” She whines, trying and failing to catch up with him. 

“You did three autopsies today!” He calls back to her, and proceeds to whoop her smug little ass.

***

He tries to tell the nurse everything he knows. She takes melatonin before she sleeps, and Prozac for mild anxiety. Does she take them every day? Well, she better. Any allergies? She says gluten makes her ill. Oh. She eats bread, though. Mhm. Doesn’t seem to do anything. Thank you, Mr. Mulder.

Do you have up-to-date contact information for the rest of her family? I do, I do. He pulls out his phone and reads off the addresses and the phone numbers, and knowing that he knows things helps to calm him down. 

They let him in and out of the room without him having to show his badge. If he had known doctors were so accommodating to spouses, he would have married her years earlier. 

Even if she’s a dumbass who climbs into cars after having a seizure.

***

“Oh my god,” she gasps, lifting her back away from the armrest. “Oh my god, how are you so good at this?”

He ignores the question and her moaning, or tries to. Her feet are in his lap, one of them wrapped up in his hands, and he kneads and digs his thumbs into the arch. On his armrest is a file, and he murmurs the sentences to himself as his eyes poor over the information, squinting through his reading glasses. 

“No. I don’t think this is what we’re dealing with. None of the witnesses reported feeling sick after they saw the lights.” He stops for a moment to slide the file on the floor and grab another one from the table, and she whines. “Shhhh. ” He resumes his reading, picks up her other foot, rolling her ankle around, then lightly folding her toes back. She hisses out her crushing pleasure, and he laughs. “Right foot is the liver, Scully. See a doctor.” She kicks him. 

He’s erect, but not painfully so, and she doesn’t say anything during the numerous times she squirms and brushes against it. “Mulder,” she sighs, licking her lips. “In the other file, did they mention the length of time that had passed before the witnesses fell ill?” 

He pauses, tilting his head. Slips the new file on the floor, bends down to retrieve the discarded one. 

“We need to start getting you the heels with the padding,” he scolds. She impatiently buries her toes into his thigh. He resumes the massage and shakes his head, amused at how close she sounds to coming when he adds more pressure. 

“Don’t you talk about my shoes,” she demands. Then she throws her head back and cries out.

***

“I got my shots, Scully, I swear it,” he sniffs miserably, burying his face into her stomach. Her sick-bellied liquid noises make waves against his ear, and he regretfully pulls away, choosing her lap instead. She runs her weak fingers through his hair.

“I know you did, baby. I did too.”  She coughs, thick with phlegm. “They’re reporting the shots are only ten percent effective. But it’s good that we got them. They’re more–” she gags. “They’re more– Oh, fuck,” she moans, shoving his head from her body and flying off of the couch.

“Meet me in the bedroom, Scully,” his scratchy voice fights to be heard over her vomiting in the kitchen sink. “Bathroom’s closer.” 

They help each other up the stairs, collapsing in a sweaty heap on the mattress, achy and bruised and chilly and burning burning hot. He sweats all over her, which he knows must be unpleasant, but she wraps her arms around him and he pulls the blanket over them both as they try and get some sleep.

***

He slides a beer and a compliment her way when she nearly kills the bartender in her sleep, having himself been on the receiving end of her somnambulant kungfu. She doesn’t always do it, but once upon a time he’d been there when she did. 

His dreams are restless, too. He’s never sure how she hears it when the guest room is so far down the hall, but some nights when she stays over he wakes to find himself sobbing in her arms, and she rocks him back to sleep and doesn’t leave him until he’s dead to the world.

Returning the favor means everything to him.

***

“Do you have any poptarts?” Scully says when he answers the phone. He bites his lip and walks over to the cabinets, trying not to trip on broken chair and piles of trash. He takes a peek in each one, finds an empty box and tosses it on the floor. They’ll clean the place. Sometime.

“All out. You at the grocery store?”

“Yeah.” Bad signal. Her voice crackles, and he calls her name a few times. Then everything’s all clear again. “You there? Sorry.”

“Yes ma’am I am.” 

“I’ll grab a box. Anything else I need to pick up?” 

“Hmmmm.” He opens the fridge and bumps his hip against it, pleased to find it mostly full. “Looks like we’re good – wait.” He bends down and shakes a carton of soy milk. “Soy milk. Orange juice. _No pulp_.”

“No pulp,” she confirms, laughing.

“Is the stuff in the tupperware for me?” He pops open the lid of one. Chicken and asparagus. His stomach growls. “I’m going to eat it anyway.” 

“Mulder! Those are for work lunches!” But he tosses it in the microwave anyway. She sighs. “There’s some in the freezer, too. We need to start freezing things.”

“I’m sick of paying thirteen fifty for the same fucking kale salad every day,” he agrees, searching for the salt shaker. He doesn’t find it, because it’s crushed to pieces between the refrigerator and the counter. 

“Great. We’ll share the responsibility. I’ll bring over half of what I make, and you better do the same,” she says cheerily, but his face falls. He’d figured they’d do it together.

***

“Your hair is everywhere,” he gripes, pulling a long strand of it out of his keyboard. _“Everywhere_. It’s like I have a cat.”

She looks faintly embarrassed, but recovers quickly. “Get a lint brush and suck it up.” She shoves her face into the filling cabinet and resumes looking for… whatever.

“What I’m going to do is collect all of it and make a voodoo doll,” he says, throwing this new strand in the trash. It’s in his books, his car. He found a strand of it between his asscheeks. _How_. “And I’m going to make you pay, Scully.”

Her head pops back up, and she tilts her head. “What are you going to do to me, Mulder?”

Her wide eyes, fake dumb and sure as hell fake innocent, that _skirt_ she is wearing. He half expects her to crawl into his lap and pull his own hair out of his head. 

He goes with it eagerly, lowering his rough voice and tilting his own head. “What do _you_ want me to do to you, Scully?

She doesn’t answer. But he knows what Scully looks like when she’s turned on, what she sounds like, smells like.

She’s turned on.

***  
  
They go to IKEA, and nothing is quite to their taste. Mulder enjoys sitting down on all the furniture anyway, and Scully picks up a rhubarb concentrate drink that they both try in the dining area.  


“Nothing?” Mulder asks, taking another sip. He winces at how sweet it is, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m getting old. Everything is too sweet.”

“This has four pounds of sugar in it, Mulder,” she says, holding the bottle in the air. She takes another swig.

“There was nothing here you liked at all? I guess it’s not really our style. We can check Craigslist.” 

She’s silent, picking at the label of the glass bottle with the edge of her nail. There’s not a lot of space in him to panic with his medication, and in general his emotional responses are much more limited these days. He doesn’t know if he likes that yet. He slit a man’s throat only a month or so ago, and he doesn’t have much to say about it.

“We can get whatever you’d like,” she says finally. 

He feels that.

***

He does some online shopping with her at his side, and after three beers she’s more comfortable with making her feelings known. She misses his leather couch and thinks they deserve a bigger T.V., one with one of those things you use to stream all the television shows but you don’t have to pay for cable. They order a teak wood drop-leaf table that’s good for spreading out their homework when they need a larger workspace, and if they’re eating dinner together or playing cards, they can tuck the middle in and they’re not so far away from each other.

They make a day of it when everything is shipped in, deep cleaning the house, ordering pizza, playing Scully’s records that she left behind when she moved out. She has to convince him to throw a lot of junk out; magazines, clothes that stopped fitting him two weight classes ago, deflated balls and assorted useless junk. 

A lot of photos catch their attention, and they take a few moments to reminisce. A few of him and Samantha are, for some reason, tucked underneath a few towels in the linen closet, and he wraps his arms around Scully when she finds them. He closes his eyes and explains what’s happening in each one. She laughs, and he hears the tears in her laughter, and he kisses her neck. She doesn’t brush him off. 

Other photos are her and him, always taken by some unknown third party, their serious, sallow frames balled up sweeps of black trenchcoat and surrounded by caution tape. A few of him and his pub mates at Oxford, lightsoaked polaroids of the Lone Gunmen. They hang the visages of their dead friends up on the fridge and put the rest away for safekeeping. When they find the photos from Curacao, they both fall silent and they both want to die. She doesn’t say anything when he stores them away in his office, perhaps also for safekeeping. 

Every hour he’s hit with some reminder that this is her house. It’s his house, but it’s her house. Her name was on the deed before his was, is still there. He’s never bought a candle in his life, but there are a billion fucking candles. The slow cooker and the coffee pot and bean grinder are all his, but the cast iron is all hers, the silverware, too, and she had picked the placemats out years ago. There’s a little stool in the corner of the kitchen she uses when he’s not there to reach the top shelf. If they bother to look in the basement, they’ll find his weights and his bag and they’ll find her weights and her bag – because they work too late to find a good gym.  

There are piles and piles of calculated clutter, and they’re not just his. He’s got his tapes and his antique books and a million magazines with the pages stuck together, but she’s got her records and her textbooks and she never puts her shoes where they belong. There are pictures of Melissa and her mother and her brothers and her dad and her dog and her middle school best friend and a sack full of concert ticket stubs she’d accumulated in her college years. She had never cleaned out her fucking lingerie drawer.

Scully lives here.

He has to do it. It’s been enough but it hasn’t been, they’re married but they’re not man and wife. 

When they put the table together, they’re arguing the whole way about what screwdriver to use, what length of screw goes where, if they should leave it open all the time or closed all the time. They put a vase in the middle that he swears is the real deal, an urn that used to contain the ashes of a well-respected warlock, but they’ll probably fill with flowers or something. They’ve argued so much they’re not really speaking at the end of it, but fuck him running, he loves her. He loves her so much. 

She’s silently straightening out the placemats when he walks up to her and kisses her, and kisses her, and kisses her. She kisses him back. They left the table long, the perfect size to bend her backward and bend over right with her. He sighs into her and he keeps his hands above her waist, his tongue in his mouth. This is his house. It’s her house, but it’s his house too. 

She pulls back with a gasp and wet lips, shaking her head. “No, no…”

“Scully,” he murmurs, leaning in again. But she shoves him back hard, sits up on the table and straightens her clothes. She nudges him aside and leaps down, stalking off on shaking legs. “ _Scully_ ,” he growls, stalking after her. 

“I can’t,” she half-sobs, reaching for her purse on the coffee table. She stumbles around for her coat, not remembering where she put it. “I can’t,” she says again, more resolute. She finds her jacket hanging up by the door, but he whips her around to face him before she can put it on. 

“Scully. Scully, I’m getting better,” he says, unable to keep the plea out of his voice and cupping her shoulders tightly. “I’m taking my meds. I’m exercising every day. I have – I have some friends that you’ve met and you – you like them. You just shot darts with us.” Now he just sounds pitiful. He brings his hands up to her shoulders, trying not to flinch when she avoids his gaze. “I’m _good_ , Scully, the best I’ve ever been. I know – I know that doesn’t mean I won’t ever…” he trails off, shaking his head. 

“You don’t know how glad I am to hear that,” she rasps. He wipes a tear away from her eye, and she leans into his touch when he cups her cheek. He pulls her to his chest, kissing the top of her head as she rubs her face into his shirt. He just holds her. When she pulls back, it’s too soon. 

Her eyes are wet when he looks into them, pale as ghosts and just as haunted. It’s a no. She’s saying no and he can’t figure out why. He is an open book these days, all of his issues having been laid out for her to beat back into shape, but he knows nothing of hers, and he is only now realizing how unfair that is. 

He stays perfectly still as she stands up on the tips of her toes to kiss his cheek and wrap her arms around his neck. 

“You are good, Mulder. You’re amazing, and you did it all by yourself.” She kisses underneath his ear, and he shudders at the warmth of her breath splaying across his skin. 

“You’ve got it seriously wrong,” he whispers, horrified. “I can’t believe how wrong you are.” 

“What we have going on right now – that’s good,” she says. “That’s what’s good for you.” 

“Scully,” he begs, pulling her tight to him. “Stop.” 

_“We_ were not good for you–”  
  
“I swear to fucking god–”

“ _I_ was not good for you–” 

“Scully.” He shoves her back and against the wall, and kisses her so hard their teeth clink together and his nose hurts and the coatrack next to them wobbles with the storm brewing. 

It’s not enough to convince her. He realizes she has gone limp and backs off, rubbing his hand over his mouth and breathing hard. 

She grabs her coat, she leaves. He’ll pick her up at her apartment in the morning.


End file.
